Dear team,
For your information and further dissemination.
Many thanks and kind regards,
Oscar
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What is Latin About Latin America?
Public Symposium, Saturday 21st May, 1.30-6pm, followed by a reception
UCL Institute of Advanced Study, Common Ground
Why are the diverse modern nations created from the overthrow of Iberian rule in the Americas known as “Latin” America? Historians of Europe argue that the French coined the term to justify neo-imperialist interventions, most notably their notorious installation of a Habsburg Emperor, Maximilian, in Mexico during the 1860s. Historians of Latin America have countered that it was invented earlier by Spanish American intellectuals, as a rallying point for unity against the emerging threat of “Anglo-America”. Some postcolonial scholars have argued that it was deployed by ruling creoles specifically to marginalise other sectors of the population. There are also contemporary debates about whether Brazil is or is not part of Latin America. In all of this discussion, little attention has been paid to the multiple references to the European classical world that appear in the art, architecture, literature, history, politics and public spaces of the Iberian Americas. There is also a long history of scholarship by both indigenous and creole intellectuals situating the history of the region within a comparative framework based on the European classical civilisations. This symposium is an opportunity to explore the significance of European classical antiquity in the history and culture of the Americas, and to debate what it might mean for our understanding of the idea of civilization.
There will be two parts to the afternoon. The first panel, The Invention of Latin America, will focus on ways the first modern Republics found non-colonial analogues and precedents in re-imaginings of European classical antiquity. The second, Latin America as magna patria, will explore the early twentieth-century emergence of a regional collective identity alongside the consolidation of national identities. For a list of speakers and full details of the programme, please see:
https://latinlatinamerica.wordpress.com
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